‘What do you need?’
‘A full crime scene team, for starters, but this is a drug house, so that squad’ll need to be informed as well. There’s a child here, unharmed, thank God, and happily munching Smarties. We’ll need Social Services for her, and we’ll need to trace her great-grandmother, whose name is Susan Coulter, probably aged seventy.’
‘How do they relate to the Watson investigation?’
‘Great-granny’s Bella’s cousin,’ Pye explained. ‘And Patrick Booth may have killed her.’
‘I’d better mark him as approach with caution, then.’
‘For sure, but the likelihood is he’s unarmed. Sauce knocked the gun out of his hand after he’d shot the girl. It’s still here, but I suppose, you never know, he may have another.’
‘I’ll make sure there’s an armed response team handy when we trace him,’ Chambers said. ‘Well done, gentlemen. You stay there and wait for the cavalry.’
‘Will do,’ the DI said. ‘But there’s one other thing we’re going to need, pronto: a gunshot residue test.’
‘Sure, but let’s catch him first.’
‘No, boss. It has to be done on me. I picked up the weapon. My prints will be on it. I’ll need to prove to Arthur fucking Dorward’s satisfaction that I didn’t shoot the girl myself.’
Twenty-Eight
‘What the hell are we doing here, Lottie?’ Dan Provan complained, as he watched the screen. ‘He’s not in fuckin’ Ireland. A cop wouldn’t run away to Ireland; he’d know it’s too well watched.’
‘This one would know that,’ his inspector agreed, ‘because he’s ex-Strathclyde, but they might not realise that in Edinburgh. The man Wilding’s coordinating this search, and he asked us to check the Troon CCTV. That’s what we’re doing. Anyway, the job’s nearly done; this is the last possible crossing he could have taken within the time frame.’
The little DS grunted, then fell silent as they viewed the lines of cars boarding the high-speed ferry, bound for the Northern Irish port of Cairnryan.
‘Nothing,’ he declared, as the recording ended. ‘You can tell your Edinburgh pal that he’s just wasted half a day of our time.’
‘I won’t be putting it that way,’ Lottie Mann said, ‘but whatever, it’s behind us now. Chances are he’s not in this part of the world at all.’
‘That’s not what the chief’s mysterious consultant psychologist thinks. . and the chief seems to have bought into the idea.’
‘That fact was not lost on me.’
‘So what’s our next port of call?’
‘Nowhere tonight, for I’ve got to get home for my wee Jakey. But tomorrow we should look as close to home as we can. For a start, we’ll talk to Human Resources, or we’ll get Sandra Bulloch to talk to them, and see if we can get a look at Mackenzie’s personnel file.’
‘Won’t they throw the usual data protection shite at us?’
‘They might try, but we’re on a potential murder inquiry and that should override any objections.’
‘Okay, but like ye’ said, that’s only for openers, and the chances are there’ll be nothing on it that takes us beyond where we’re at the now. I think we’ll need to dig a good bit deeper. While you’re waitin’ for that file, I’ll speak to somebody I know that might have worked with the Bandit. I know that most people thought he was a bampot, but this fella might be able to help. The Mackenzie I remember, ye’d no choice but to listen to the sod, so he might have let something useful slip sometime or other.’
‘Discretion, Dan,’ Lottie warned.
‘The guy I’ll talk to, that’s his middle name.’
Twenty-Nine
‘What’s going to happen to the wee girl?’ Cheeky’s expression was as serious as Sauce had ever known it. In fact he struggled to recall the last time he had seen her frown.
‘That’s a good question,’ he admitted, pausing his forkful of coiled spaghetti halfway to his mouth. ‘Daddy shot Mummy, so he’s not going to be around to bring her up.’
‘Didn’t you say she has a granny?’
‘No, I said great-granny. They traced her this afternoon. She’s seventy, and she has arthritis, so she’s not going to be any help.’
‘They?’ she repeated. ‘Who are they? Why not you and Sammy?’
‘The head of CID says that we shouldn’t investigate the shooting. We were witnesses to the crime, so she wants an objective SIO. Jack McGurk’s heading it up, with Karen Neville.’
‘Have they got anywhere?’
‘A traffic warden reported Booth’s car, parked on a yellow line, just outside Waverley Station.’ His face twisted into something that might have been a smile, had it been a little less vicious. ‘You might say that was a wee bit of a clue, the first, as it happens. The second was when he used his credit card to buy a rail ticket to London.’
‘Do you know which train he got?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, his voice hard. ‘It wouldn’t even matter if he gets off at an earlier station. He’ll leave the platform in handcuffs. . and that’s if he behaves himself. The transport cops are waiting for him at every stop, with armed support.’
‘You sound as if you’d like them to shoot him, Sauce. That’s not like you.’
‘It wouldn’t bother me one bit if they did,’ he confessed.
‘Why did he kill the girl? Was it just because she had let you two in?’
‘I don’t think he meant to kill her.’
‘Then. .’ she stopped, and that rare frown returned. ‘Was he shooting at you?’
‘Nah,’ he said, ‘he was probably just firing wild, trying to scare us. That’s what his defence QC will say, I’m sure.’
She reached across the table and turned his face up towards hers, forcing eye contact. ‘I don’t believe that.’
‘Lucky for him you can’t be on the jury, then.’
‘Sauce, he tried to shoot you, didn’t he, but he killed the girl instead. That’s what happened, isn’t it?’
‘It all went off very fast,’ he murmured. ‘Although it didn’t seem that way at the time; the after-effects of a kick in the balls stay with you for a long time.’
‘And now you’re all twisted up because the woman got what was meant for you. I know it, love. I can tell.’
‘Not just that.’ He shook his head. ‘I hit him with my baton as he was trying to aim. I’m chewed up by the thought that if I hadn’t, Vicky might still be alive.’
‘And you might not.’ She squeezed his chin, hard. ‘Now you listen to me, Harold Haddock. That girl lived behind that steel door. She knew why it was there and she knew exactly what was going out through the letterbox. She lived with a dangerous man, she chose his lifestyle and she spent the money it brought in. You live by it, you die by it. Trust me, I’m an authority on the subject; look at my family background. My mother’s a fucking thief, my Aunt Goldie’s a monster, and my grandfather was Dundee’s answer to the Krays, with a wee bit more menace about him than them, so they say.
‘I could have been that girl Vicky, if Grandpa hadn’t kept me out of the life. If I sound hard it’s because it’s in my genes, but if it takes a dead slut to bring you home alive, that’s fine by me.’
‘There’s still a kid left with no parents,’ he whispered.
‘She’ll be better off without them,’ Cheeky retorted. She flashed a small smile his way. ‘Maybe we could adopt her.’
Sauce winced. ‘We may have to, if we want kids. I haven’t been able to bring myself to look at my baw-bag yet.’
‘Oh, you poor love.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle with you.’
‘It’ll still be like juggling hand grenades.’ He stopped and his expression changed as a recollection came to him.
‘Your grandpa,’ he said. ‘Maybe next time you speak to him you might ask him whether, in that other former life of his, the one we don’t usually talk about, he ever had dealings with a man called Perry Holmes. If he did, it would be useful to know whether he ever met Holmes’s son. He uses his mother’s name; he’s known as Hastie McGrew.’